Evolutionary-Potential TM in Technical and Business Systems

An evolved version of TRIZ containing a series of generically predictable technology and business evolution trends uncovered from the systematic analysis of patents, academic journals and business texts. The current state of the art now brings the total number of generic technical trends to over 30, and the number of business trends to over 20. The article describes some of the newly discovered trends, and their incorporation into a design method that allows individuals and businesses to first establish the relative maturity of their current systems, and then, more importantly, identify areas where ‘evolutionary potential’ exists. The article introduces this concept of evolutionary potential defined as the difference between the relative maturity of the current system, and the point where it has reached the limits of each of the evolution trends through a number of case study examples focused on the design and evolution of both technical and business systems.